An Easy Way To Find And Replace Text In Multiple Documents At The Same Time

Here’s the scenario that’s baffling to many Mac users. You have a dozen documents that have the wrong address. The normal way to change the old address to the new address is to open all 20 documents, and paste in the new address.

Simple enough, but tedious and time consuming. It only gets worse as the number of documents grows. It’s even worse if there’s more to change than just an address. Enter your Mac and the app that finds and replaces text with a click.

Find It. Replace It. Love It.

Find and replace is not a geeky feature. It’s common enough to show up on nearly any Mac text editor, free or not so free.

Within any document you can select find, enter what you want to find, and either find those instances, or replace them with other text.

Easy enough, right? Except when there are dozens of documents that need that find and replace effort.

Enter Find & Replace It!, the Mac app that can search within documents, multiple documents at the same time, and replace all kinds of text with pretty much whatever you want.

Grab a folder full of documents that need to have a string of text replaced, and Find & Replace It! does just that. In seconds, on multiple documents. It’ll work quickly on a simple one page document. It’ll work quickly on a log of 10-gigabytes.

Text can be a funny thing, and not all documents are created equal. Find & Replace It! handles dozens of different text encodings. There’s even a built-in expression editor so you can get you geek on and build advanced search and replace functions.

Wait! What if you screw up and replace something that should not be replaced? Find & Replace It! also comes with a preview function so you can see what’s about to be replaced without anything actually happening.

This is a tool for anyone who messes with text. It’s multi-threaded and fast. You control the user interface (modular). It’s cross platform (MAcs and Windows PCs). It converts text encoding and line endings.

While an app such a Find & Replace It! can be a valuable tool if you deal with text, there are some deal breaker issues. It doesn’t handle Microsoft Word documents or Apple’s Pages documents, and no PDFs, of course. That means it’s good for the geek or geeky wannabe, but not for the vast majority of Mac and Windows folks who just need to find and replace strings of text is regular word process documents.

5G? Meh!

About Wil Gomez

I live in Brooklyn, New York and work in Manhattan; a Mac owner for almost 25 years, and an IT specialist on mixed platforms-- Mac, Windows, and Linux. Read more of my articles here. My fiancée is semi-famous Kate MacKenzie. Follow her on PixoBebo.